“Here lies the body of Cynthia Britton. Average in social studies, terrible in math, excellent in English. Her incredible vocabulary will live on inside me, for she taught me everything I know, I mean, she even read more books than Ms. Newton. But what Cynthia loved most, more than her vocabulary and her books, was riding through the back forty of this here Brushy Creek and taking a swim in this very creek. This creek where we’re gathered today, honoring her memory.” The young girl paused for effect. Chiming and swishing, the water bundled over the rocks, a horse’s skin tingled with the buzzing of flies, his breath coming out in a snort, interrupting the silence. “She will be missed.” Her eyes slipped closed, her small hands entwined, sticky at her heart.

“Pegasus will miss her most, but of course I will step in to care for him, and make sure he gets plenty of rides, plenty of apples and oats.” The steed’s velvet nose found the girl’s hair as his name rang into the soft summer air.

  “Chris will miss her, but he’d rather have a younger brother anyways, I know this for a fact. Prue and Cathy will miss her, but they’ll be playing with dolls and probably won’t blink an eye when they hear the news.” The girl scoffed, punctuating her eulogy of sorts with a smear of annoyance before continuing, “Might even make her into a little doll, so she can live in their dollhouse and be at their whims, which would of course be horrible for Cynthia, because they’d cut her hair and forget to feed her, and anyways, I’m rambling. She never played with them, so I think maybe they’d be happier with her gone and transformed into a doll. And Mother will miss her, because she has to, but maybe she’ll be pleased with one less mouth to feed, which she says so often I wouldn’t be all too surprised to hear she wasn’t all too sad over it. But, as I was saying, Cynthia Britton will be missed. Amen.”

Only the soft voice of the land returned the Amen. Cynthia looked up from her hands wound clammy at her heart to the empty spurred bank of Brushy Creek. Pegasus stood in reverent silence behind her, his ashen. The maw of a summer sunset widened, the sun glowing warmer and warmer over the hilled portion of heaven in which Cynthia lived. Nowhere else in Iowa would the sun find a crux on a hillcrest and splice the land right open like it did. She lived summers with her grandparents, pinched within the only rolling hills and valleys of Iowa. Really. The moment tire or foot struck the gravel out the front door, the pulse of the land went flat. And stretched endlessly, in all directions, as lifelessly intoned as lines on her notebook paper, before she filled them with her favorite words. 

            She had in the pocket of her pants, the pants that her mother so hated, a creased photo of her with her sisters. The white fold, like a palm line struck through, cut her midsection in half, and her sisters, so much shorter than Cynthia’s awkward, lanky frame, were torn at the neck. She held it at arms’ length, her feet at the edge of the water, sloshing warmly over her toes, and after a moment, she let it fall with a deep satisfaction. It swept down softly. A gentle goodnight.

            Pegasus, as though in commemoration for his very alive owner, neighed quietly, stamped the muddy shore, and surveyed the sunset.

            “Anything anyone would like to say about our dear friend and daughter Cynthia, now’s the time. Pegasus?” She turned toward the pale grey, speckled horse, and he blinked, flicked his tail. “Do you have some words for your sweet, sweet Cynthia before she’s gone for good?”

He simply shook the flies off his neck.

“Of course, you would never tell me I couldn’t be a boy if I wanted to, now, would you? You’re the best of us, Pegasus, you really are. You’d call me by my name if I asked, I know that for a fact,” Cynthia said, a sly smile slipping across her face as she paused for a moment to give him the chance to reveal the impossible, but he only blinked his dark, kind eyes and snorted.

Only her brother Chris really knew that Cynthia wanted to be called Chet. It rolls off the tongue nicely, nicer than Cynthia, which is smooth at first, and then the tongue trips over the middle and comes out the other side, never wanting to say the name again. Or so she thought. Which is why people called her Cyn, pronounced ‘sin’, and she never quite loved how it felt to be called ‘sin’, for obvious reasons. It was Chet that soothed her, that fit, that made sense, that sounded as sweet as the preacher’s supple alto in church, that was a gospel of its own to her. It would always be Chet.

For that reason, she pictured her own death often. A small female figure in the water, cold and soft and being enveloped by the cool nectar of her favorite place, the gentle current washing over her until she was simply erased, turned to sand and silt. She chose only to imagine these pleasant scenarios that made death feel like a good night’s sleep—where she’d wake up reincarnated, a new identity, muddled old memories just like the depths of a hideaway swimming hole, something deep and murky and almost reassuring in its unfamiliarity. She felt as though she could lay down right now in the water, Cynthia would float down Brushy Creek, and maybe she could be Chet somewhere else, somewhere down the banks.

The sun was getting lower, and surely somewhere her mother was calling her name into the field, time to come home for dinner—Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia. She got up on Pegasus’ back and spurred him to towards the house. Cynthia, her mother’s voice lilting in the dusky air, over the great stretch of land, and everything in it. Cynthia, the ants and worms crawled beneath the clover and grass; Cynthia, the sparrows chirruped in the apple trees; Cynthia, the creek tasted her photograph, swallowing her whole; Cynthia, the black walnut grove harvested her name; Cynthia, neighboring cows slumbered; Cynthia, the mosquitos emerged from the damp; Cynthia, the strawberries and rhubarb ripened to the sound of it; Cynthia, her grandparents creaked across the original farm house’s tired floor; Cynthia, the lasting heat of the sun echoed her name; Cynthia, the silhouette of the house, pictured against the paling sky, her mother standing there on the porch in a dress she made, waving her closer as she galloped through the field, almost home.

Chet, Chet, Chet.